Cat in a Neon Nightmare

“Our spats aside, what are you doing up and about after your recent six rounds with the Mojave Desert? Do you forget the extreme difficulty I had dragging you to the highway, then hitching a ride back to town in the back of a squad car, no less? Talk about a risky undercover assignment, that was my top job, mitts down.”

  “I am as stiff as Miss Kitty the Cutter at the moment,” she admits, “but pampering will only delay my recovery. If I had been hit by a car near Twenty-fourth Street where the wild things hang out, no one would have stirred a whisker for me. Up there in Feral Country it is move or die.”

  “I got you safely back to the Crystal Phoenix, did I not? And speaking of ‘knot,’ that is what all my muscles were in after squiring your semiconscious form around half of Clark County.”

  She pussyfoots over and sits beside me. “You are the usual unsung hero, Pops, but that is the lot of an undercover operative. Speaking of which, I have been thinking.”

  “Apparently this is such a rare occasion that you must get up in the middle of the night and hotfoot it over here without even remembering to use your own facilities.”

  “Everything is such a territory issue with dudes. If you all could get over it we would have world peace.”

  “Then what would there be to do? Sit on our assets and clip coupons?”

  “Whatever.” She yawns.

  I stifle a comment that such a young thing should be in bed by now. It sounds too solicitous and I would never like to be mistaken for solicitous. It ruins my image.

  “So what is so earth-shaking that you need to ankle over here and play Oriental sand painting in my executive bathroom?”

  “Something in Blues Brother’s testimony has been bothering me. I think we should visit the twentieth floor of the Goliath Hotel.”

  “And risk all those bird droppings again?! They fly around unfettered up there, you know. I personally do not think your looks would be flattered by a bird poop chapeau.”

  “Please, Pops! No need to get vulgar. We have dodged the airborne missives so far. There is something I really think you should know. Unless, you believe the savvy operator prefers to remain in the dark about some things.”

  “Of course not. I am only in the dark if I know it.” Wait! That did not make sense. Oh well, no need to tip off the kit. “So you want me to hike back to the Goliath on a whim of yours?”

  “Who knows?” she asks coyly, buffing her fingernails with her tongue. “You might thank me for it.”

  Well, that does it. The chit is insinuating that she knows more than I do. I will not sleep the rest of the night worrying about that possibility anyway.

  So it is that Midnight, Inc. Investigations creeps out of the well-lit comforts of the Circle Ritz, down a callused palm tree trunk, and out into the warm and well-populated Las Vegas streets.

  By now we have made breaking into the Goliath and its bank of elevators an art form, if I do say so myself.

  Miss Louise snags a fallen gaming chip in the casino and carries it by mouth to the elevator area.

  I lurk behind the ever-popular ashtray, here an embellished column mimicking beaten copper.

  “Look at that!” cries the obligatory tourist. “A cat with a chip in its mouth.”

  Better than a cat with a chip on its shoulder, lady. Those are called lions and tigers and leopards.

  So little Miss Louise trots into the elevator car, the object of all wonder and admiration, and I slip in after her and cringe in a dark corner where even the security camera can’t see.

  “And what floor do you want, little lady?” the man tourist asks Louise with a wink at his wife.

  She sits solemnly and stares straight ahead, but I realize that she is meditating deeply, mentally intoning the desired floor number like any superstitious gambler silently pleading for a roulette number to come up. With us cats, it works.

  The man winks again at his wife while his forefinger taps a random elevator button. “Will that do, Miss High Stakes?”

  He has, of course, hit twenty right on the nose. If only he was so lucky at the gaming tables. It occurs to me that Miss Louise and I might get quite a racket going in that area, but the thing is we know where we want to go here, though nobody human would believe it, and in a gaming situation we would know no more than anybody what numbers would come up. Unless the great and powerful Bast would deign to let us in on it. Naw, Bastet is into mummy cases, not casinos.

  Anyway, the tourist couple exits long before we do.

  “I could have hit the right floor with one bound after they left,” I tell Louise.

  She spits out the five-dollar chip as if it were a live mouse. “By then the elevator would have been called to some other floor, and we would have to justify our presence again. This is better. Here is our floor now.”

  I edge out of the open door behind her, hunting for airborne pollution.

  Sure enough, a flash of blue and white above reveal that Blues Brother is out and about for the evening.

  I duck behind an ashtray just in case.

  Miss Louise sits and curls her long fluffy train around her petite feet.

  “I have been thinking,” she says, “about the bird-brain cat whose high-altitude antics lured the pitiful Miss Vassar into teetering death.”

  “Balancing on these railings at this height is folly,” I agree, “but we did it.”

  “In the course of an investigation. This other feline was merely being stupid. Therefore, I have come to an interesting conclusion I am eager to test on the firm’s senior partner. Are you ready?”

  “This does not involve further shenanigans with the railings?”

  “No, merely some subterfuge with the hotel rooms.”

  “Oh, well, if humans can manage that sort of thing all the time, we can do it.”

  So we begin. Of course my superior leaping skills are called upon to produce a thump against the hotel-room door that approximates an actual knock.

  I am soon huffing and puffing like a hungry wolf, or coyote. Many of the residents are not at home, but are out having a good time on the town, unlike myself.

  Miss Louise sits by the railing casting an assessing eye at the floors above.

  “Try twenty-eighty-eight,” she suggests.

  “If this is an exercise in games of chance,” I say, “I am about to run out of patience and breath.”

  “It is only a theory,” she answers with a shrug that riffles through her ruff.

  I am not eager to plead middle-aged spread to Miss Midnight Louise, so I jump and thump again and at number 2088 am finally rewarded with an answer.

  But what an answer!

  “Ye-es?” carols a sickeningly sweet human voice that also manages to be shrill and unpleasant.

  I gaze, eye-level, upon a pair of hyper-extended insteps balanced on shoe heels thinner and taller than a knitting needle.

  I cringe in horror. Miss Louise has led me into the lair of my worst enemy, worse even than the evil Hyacinth and her maniacal mistress Shangri-La.

  I am at the stiletto-heeled mercy of Savannah Ashleigh, erstwhile actress and would-be destroyer of my masculine charms.

  Luckily, she is apparently as blind as a bat while relaxing at home without her contact lenses and stares out over the atrium asking “Who was there?”

  Between her oblivious ankles—and I do not know how ankles may be oblivious, except that Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s indeed seem to be that way—wafts a wisp of smoke and fur and Persian perfection I have seen before.

  It wafts right out into the hall, and there remains as Miss Savannah surrenders and shuts the door.

  “Yvette!” I cry, stunned by her beauty and presence yet again.

  She weaves herself around me, her black-tipped silver fur coat and mascara’ed aquamarine eyes weaving me into their spell. Hyacinth who?

  “What have you been up to?” I ask, thinking of her pet food commercial contract.

  A sardonic voice interrupts my idyll. Miss Midnight Louise.

  “Up on the railing, I
think? So, Miss Yvette, did the pretty lady try to pet you, did she try to lift you down and fall over the edge herself?”

  “Pretty lady?” Yvette fluffs her ruff, which surrounds her piquant little face like an Elizabethan lace collar. “I do not know what you mean. I have been out of the room when my mistress is sleeping or gone. She often forgets to lock the deadbolt, ugly name! She leaves the bigger brass prong set inside the door to keep it ajar when she goes down the hall for ice, which is frequently. Thus I am free to slip out and take the air.”

  “Did you ‘take the air’ on the railing a week ago?” Louise demands in her usual surly tones.

  The Divine Yvette answers with her usual sublime patience. “I may have. I like to watch the sushi on the wing. This is not the People’s Court, miss, I am not obligated to answer. Is that not right, Louie, mon amour?”

  Well, what can I say to that? “Enough of this grilling, Louise. Miss Yvette is not a suspect in anything.”

  “If enticing a human to her death is not a crime, then I suppose she is not.”

  “Yvette?” I growl. “Not Yvette.”

  “A ‘pale cat with attractive dark feathering’ on the railing. Sounds like a shaded silver Persian. You heard the bird. Eyewitness testimony and he even talks so humans can understand him.”

  “Yvette, did you see the pretty lady seven nights ago?” I ask in my turn.

  “What is time to me? Someone did come and try to catch me and pick me up and pet me and get their naked oily hands all over my recently laved fur. I was able to leap away, like mist. These humans are so clumsy. I remember that mindless mimic of the air, that morsel on wings, crying “Pretty bird!” As if I were chopped liver! I escaped back into my room to restore my garb to proper order. What wrong is there in that?”

  I cannot speak.

  The Divine Yvette is the feline femme fatale who apparently lured the ill-fated Vassar into her penultimate act of mercy that became an inadvertent dive.

  It was an utter accident, of course. On both their parts. But I cannot deny that Vassar acted from the nobler intent, my admired Yvette from the baser one.

  Still, one can understand that an oft-pawed beauty might naturally rebuff even an attempted rescue.

  I glance at Miss Louise, who is sitting by offering the sour demeanor of Judge Judy to the proceedings.

  “The human female only tried to rescue you,” I tell her. But the Divine Yvette is as blind in her fashion as her self-absorbed mistress.

  “I did not need it,” the Divine One says pointedly. She flounces back to her door, where she begins to paw with her declawed right mitt, making a nerve-grinding shwshshs shwshshs shwshshs sound.

  I sit bemused. Then I hear a thump behind me.

  Miss Midnight Louise is now balanced on the railing board, looking down.

  “Off!” I order.

  “There it is.”

  “What?”

  “Miss Vassar’s cell phone. It had to have fallen with her, but it caught in the fork of that potted Norfolk pine tree on the level below.”

  I jump up beside her. Two can play at this game, which some would call “chicken.”

  Sure enough, I spot a small oblong of dull silver metal, a cell phone in a pine tree. If that cell phone could talk…but of course it cannot. And of course the police will never discover it up here.

  “Get down from there, Louise. We have seen our job and done it.”

  She obeys me, leaving me momentarily speechless.

  Behind me I hear Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s door open.

  “You naughty kitten!” she admonishes the Divine One. “How did you slip out?”

  The door closes, and I realize I have neglected to turn to capture a last glimpse of that vanishing plume of fur, of summer and smoke.

  Miss Midnight Louise is shaking her head as if a flea, or two, were cohabitating in her ear. Perhaps witnessing the Divine One’s sublime indifference to her own role in a recent death has shaken my partner, for she says to me out of the blue, “I did not mean to kill her, Pop. Just to distract her from taking out Mr. Max.”

  “You are discussing a woman nicknamed Kitty the Cutter. Not only that, in this instance she was a rogue driver. Innocents could have been killed. And do you think she would have hesitated to run you over if you had gotten between her and Mr. Max’s car? You were the backseat driver on that ’cycle. She was out of control. You did what you had to do.”

  “Still…I have never killed anything that big before. And humans are supposed to be the superior breed.”

  “Every breed is superior in its own mind. There are inferior humans just as there are inferior cats, hard as that is to believe. But none of that matters when it comes down to an issue of life and death. Mr. Max”—here I swallow my territorial pride for the first time in my nine lives—“is a dear friend of my Miss Temple, and I should hate to have my roommate in mourning for the next millennium if anything untoward should happen to him. You did the right thing. You did what I would have done.”

  “Gee, thanks.” She gives me the skeptical green-eyed slit. “I have never before considered ‘what you would have done,’ to be any standard worth aspiring to.”

  Before the terrible import of those convictions quite clear the hurdle of my overworked brain, Miss Louise gives me a quick lick on the chops.

  “But I may have to reconsider my standards,” she says. “Such is life and death, I see, on the mean streets of Las Vegas. Thanks for the buggy ride, Daddy-o Dearest.”

  I shudder to think what Miss Louise’s memoirs will have to say about me. I had better get started on my own, pronto.

  Chapter 46

  Callback

  The phone rang. His phone rang.

  Matt stared at Kinsella. Max had killed Kitty? Was it possible?

  Yes. They were old enemies.

  “Better answer,” Kinsella suggested, seizing the Bushmill’s bottle by the neck for a refill.

  As if Matt, a Polish beer man according to Kinsella, would hog Irish whiskey.

  He got up and went to the bedroom phone, the only one he owned. Yet. He could smell a cell phone in his future, but at least now he still had a very unportable model and could use it as an excuse to escape the unthinkable. Was he entertaining a confessed murderer in his living room? Wouldn’t Carmen Molina be enchanted to know that?

  “Hello.”

  “Matt. Am I calling too early for out there?” asked Frank Bucek’s vibrant ex-teacher voice.

  “No. We’re awake and at ’em out here.”

  “That three-hour time difference is annoying. I have to remember not to call at the crack of dawn when it’s mid-morning here in Virginia.”

  Not just Virginia. Quantico. FBI headquarters. Matt wondered what the place had got its name from.

  “I have something,” Frank announced.

  He’d always boomed out sermons and homilies in the priesthood, hadn’t allowed any mumbling among the altar boys. Nothing retiring about Father Frankenfurter.

  “On…the woman.”

  “On your persecutor. Kathleen O’Connor. No ‘Kathy,’ for her, at least not with the IRA.”

  “I asked you to look into her months ago, and you didn’t find anything.”

  “Ah, Matt, me boyo. That was before nine-eleven and the IRA began playing ball-o with the English and American authorities. Can you believe it? The enormity of the World Trade Center attack gave the IRA pause. They’d been in peace negotiations anyway, then said publicly that the scale of the attack on the U.S. was so extreme that they would never bomb Britain again.”

  “They’re terrorists.”

  “Yes. Who believed them? And of course they have their hard-nosed elements who will never give in or never give up mayhem. But, by and large, begorra, they’ve been as sincere as you can expect of reformed terrorists. And…they’re cooperating with the authorities, so this time I finally got some information on the bane of your block, Kathleen O’Connor.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “
What?”

  “I just identified the body. A motorcycle accident.”

  “And it was her, for certain?”

  “I saw her face. It was scraped and bruised, but hers, no mistake. I identified her on the coroner’s examining table.”

  “Ouch. I don’t like those places. They make you not quite believe in immortal souls, seeing all those mortal remains so still and shattered and such dead meat. So you’re sure.”

  “Yes, but I’d still like to know more about her.”

  “I don’t know much more. They admitted to knowing of her, but said that she had long ago become a rogue agent.”

  “How do you become a rogue IRA terrorist?”

  “You don’t take orders, for one. The biggest no-no. That’s true of any para-governmental agency.”

  “ ‘Para-governmental agency’? We’ve got them too?”

  “We’ve got everything we need in a modern, dangerous world. And sometimes it isn’t enough. Anyway, Kathleen went off on her own years ago. Would send money home. They tagged her as working South America, the Irish-Latino community there, which is almost as big as the German-Latino community, aka the Hitler has-beens. She sent them money periodically. They didn’t ask where it came from or where she was.”

  “So she supported them, and followed her own agenda, unsupervised.”

  “They didn’t want to supervise her. Found her way too unstable for terrorism. A kind of Fury. Who’s the mythological creature with the serpents for hair—? God, my memory. Methuselah doesn’t sound right. Too Biblical.”

  “Medusa. That’s Greek.”

  “Right. Miss O’Connor was a human Medusa to them. Every lock of her raven-black hair was sheer poison to touch. Apparently some of them tried.”

  “Raven-black?”

  “Yes. They say she was a beauty the way an honorable death is beautiful. A terrible beauty, to quote the poet. Were they right?”

  “Maybe. Her eyes were plastic and her face was…eroded…at the end. It wasn’t a beautiful death.”

  “Yes, we did use to say that in the church, didn’t we? ‘A beautiful death.’ I don’t see much of those in the FBI. I suppose one thinks of a very old person, fading away without pain and faithfully shriven. Does that much happen in our Alzheimer’s, post-HMO world anymore, do you think?”